CONTAINING A FEW COMMENTS ON THE WORK OF THAT NAME, PUBLISHED BY THE MARQUIS OF WORCESTER, IN 1663.
There is nothing which the world dreads so much as an unpitying truth. The history of ideas is that of men trying to persuade themselves that special miracles of amiability are ever being worked, from the cradle to the grave, in their favor. Of the tremendous inconsistency and destructiveness which such miracles imply, they take no heed. The most unpalatable fact in physics is that of the Struggle for Life.
Ideas once born may never die, but it is worth noting how many men must die ere their ideas can live. The Indo-Germanic race has always been blessed with many of those self-cursed martyrs, the Anticipators, or the men who have outstripped their age. Like the advance guard of the summer swallows, they have generally died by frosts and lived in fables.
Germany is very proud of her Berchthold Schwartz, and in her pride has made a proverb declaring that his invention was the proof of supreme wisdom. When they describe a fool, they say there that he did not discover gunpowder. But 'the first handful of gunpowder' did not, as Carlyle claims, drive Monk Schwartz's pestle through the ceiling. Long before Schwartz, lived Bacon; and a century or so before Bacon, there were in existence Norman-Latin recipes, says Palsgrave—who had seen them—ad faciendum le craké, for making firecrackers—at least, for making gunpowder which would crack merrily when fired. Stained glass windows, according to the cheap and easy explanations of those who used to send us to natural scenery for every origin in architecture, were suggested by beholding the winter sunset lines of the sky through the bare gothic-window tracery of a leafless forest. Recent research finds the stained window in the antique burning East, where no studies were made by frost or forest light—nay, the leaves carved by tradition-loving Gothic Free Masons in churches often keep a peculiar Eastern form.
I am not, however, lecturing of Lost Arts in the strain which sings 'there is nothing new under the sun,' and which in a chilling manner benumbs the faith in progress by shaking with a grin before the wearied inventor some skeleton puppet of buried ages, which resembles his great thought as a hut resembles a palace. On the contrary, I find in this strange frequency of anticipation among Indo-Germanic races, and in its premature failures, a vast proof of inventive vitality and of promise of great rising truths into all future ages. 'Steam power is nothing new,' say the advocates of the genius of the past. Hero of Alexandria invented a steam toy—as he who can read his Spiritalia published by the Jesuits in 1693 may learn for himself. But the power now roaring and whizzing all over the world, and which would build every pyramid and every monument of Egypt now extant in twenty-four hours, is no toy. When I think of this, there is no ingenious trifle for amusement which does not inspire a droll awe. Possibly those walking dolls now performing their weary pilgrimages on level glass-pane floors in Broadway windows—gravely lifting those enormous gilded boots, which remind me of Miss Kilmansegg and Queen Berta à grands piés, in one—have a good reason for their dignity of gait. For may they not be golden-footed and solemn, like her who rose from the waves of old to prophesy to her son?—and if she was silver-footed, it makes no difference, for so are some of the autoperiper—nay, that word finishes me, and I go no further. Such a block of Greek would bring even a German sentence down with a crash to a verbless conclusion. What I would have said was, that it may be that these dolls are heralds of greater dolls yet to come, which shall be wound up to fetch and carry, to sew on buttons—nay, it is even possible (in the wildest of dreams) that they may be made to boil potatoes properly. And I have been told that a recent improvement in boys' rocking horses, by means of which a trotting motion is given to the legs of those docile animals, has suggested to a mechanic of this city the construction of a very good automatic steed, whose only fault is slowness. May I suggest that a very great improvement indeed may yet be made on that horse, and that the two-forty of a coming generation may be the result, not of oats and hay, but of steel springs and cylinders? The first wooden horse burnt Troy—what will the last do?
I have been reminded of the strange tendency in man—but more especially of the Indo-Germanic or Aryan man—to anticipate by invention the wants of an age, sometimes centuries beforehand—by turning over that very curious work, the 'Century of Inventions,' by the Marquis of Worcester, in which, as in the commonplace book of an author, one may find jotted down many an undeveloped idea of great promise. In this connection we may be allowed to borrow somewhat from a biography by Charles F. Partington, published in 1825.
Edward Lord Herbert, the sixth earl and second Marquis of Worcester, was born at Ragland near Monmouth; and his family, long distinguished for the most devoted loyalty, possessed the largest landed estate of any then attached to the British court. What this was in those times is set forth by the fact that in 1628 the father of the marquis had a revenue of upward of twenty thousand pounds. In 1642, the year in which his son was created marquis, the young heir raised, supported, and commanded an army of 1,500 foot and near 500 horse soldiers.
He had a stormy life before him, this young marquis, with many more scenes, adventures, and changes than are to be found in Woodstock and Peveril of the Peak. How he fought well, recapturing Monmouth among other things from the Puritan General Massey, how he was appointed, in consequence of his daring cavaliering raids, by Charles II to negotiate with the Irish Catholics; how the king often visited him at Ragland, is all a fine story, well worth reading. We can get glimpses of that REGAL life—as Mr. Partington admiringly small-caps his climax, from the 'list of the Ragland household' with the earl's order of dining—castle gates closed at eleven o'clock in the morning, the entry of the earl with a grand escort, 'the retiral of the steward'—the advance of 'the Comptroller, Mr. Holland, attended by his staff'—'as did the sewer, the daily waiters, and many gentlemen's sons, with estates from two to seven hundred pounds a year, who were bred up in the castle, and my lady's gentlemen of the chamber.' Therein, too, we see the rattling of trenchers, and hear the gurgling of bottles, at the first table, of the noble family, and such stray nobility as came there; at the second table, of knights and honorables—at the second 'first table' in the hall of 'Sir Ralph Blackstone, Steward; the Comptroller, the Master of the Horse, the Master of the Fish Ponds, my Lord Herbert's Preceptor,' and such gentlemen as were under degree of a knight—these all being 'plentifully served with wine.' Of the second table there is no note of much wine, but it still had 'hot meats from my Lord's table,' and at it sat the Sewer with gentlemen waiters and pages to the number of twenty-four—and even now we are not yet come to the vulgar. For at the third table sat my Lord's Chief Auditor, his Purveyor of the Castle, Keeper of the Records—Ushers of the Hall—Clerk—Closet Keeper—Master of the Armory—and below these divers Masters of the Hounds—Twelve Master Grooms of the Stables, Master Falconer—Keepers of the Red Deer Park—and below these yet one hundred and fifty 'footmen, grooms, and other menial servants.'
Bright gleams vanish—the stately dinner parties grow dim, Masters of Horses and Hounds go to battle, the plate is melted down, and all is sad and sere. The young lord is sent by King Charles abroad, and Parliamentary Fairfax comes thundering at the gate, where admittance is refused by the venerable old marquis. Fairfax besieges boldly and is gallantly attacked by repeated sallies. I had rather the Puritans, with whom all my head goes, and with it half my heart, had behaved better than they did on this occasion. For after the venerable old marquis had fought nobly and surrendered on honorable terms, I am sorry to say he was most dishonorably treated, the conditions of capitulation being disgracefully violated, and the old marquis put in close prison, where he soon died in his eighty-fifth year.—Well, well—there was abundance of such false faith and dark villany on both sides ere the war was over. Be it remembered that these same nobles had kept the honor too closely to themselves, and ridiculed it out of life quite too sharply in the 'base mechanicals' to fairly expect mastery in gentility from them. And in these same Partingtonian Biographies, I am often inclined to suspect that the lions do some of their own carving.
Puritans sequestered and smashed the estate right and left—lead sold for six thousand pounds, woods cut down and sold for one hundred thousand more. 'Pity!' do you say? Reader mine, there is enough land in parks at this present day in broad England to feed that wretched one eighth of her population who are now buried at public expense. That dis-parking business was at any rate not badly done.